Description: Melusine's Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth offers nineteen new critical essays from an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars examining the cultural, literary, and mythical inheritance of the legendary half-fairy, half-serpent Melusine.
Review Quotes: "This magnificent book combines the research of twenty interdisciplinary scholars who meticulously investigate the eponymous footprint of Melusine from a wide variety of literary as well as artistic approaches. It illustrates how richly this theriomorphic monstrous snake woman has contributed to the culture of so many European countries, and extends as far afield as China, in a study that clearly indicates the continuing fascination of this most enchanting and threatening figure. Melusine is here variously discussed as an instructive exemplar of Christian piety, a powerful mother who desires to humanize herself through marriage into the chivalric, religious order of her age, a transformative figure unifying humanity with nature, an abject object of the gaze, a fairy who functions as a monstrous Other in the mirror of romance, and a metaphor for transgressive feminine prowess. This enthralling work contributes extensively to Melusinia, reading the fairy serpentine hybrid as a symbolic force who never remains contained within any boundaries that may attempt to inscribe her."
Gillian M. E. Alban (author of Melusine the Serpent Goddess in A. S. Byatt's Possession and in Mythology (2003) and The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women's Fiction: Petrifying, Maternal and Redemptive (2017).
"Essential reading not only for medievalists, but also for scholars focused on fairy tale and folklore studies, cultural studies, feminist theory, gender theory, and postmodernist theory. Melusine's Footprint reinvigorates the study of the Melusine tale and her depiction in various texts from the Medieval period through contemporary representations. The analyses vary theoretically and render new interpretations, keeping Melusine alive for scholars in the humanities and the social sciences".
Sylvia Veronica Morin, in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 30 (1), (2019).